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Leperflesh posted:Dragon guys: not realistic enough. Magic: perfectly fine. Well that's sort of the problem with typical fantasy and D&D in particular. They have shaped expectations for decades, and in such ways that some things seem very realistic and others not at all, even though they're both wildly out of theme for medieval Europe. Simple example: firearms. Lots of people object to the presence of gunpowder in D&D because they want to "keep it medieval" but they have no problems at all with full plate armor. Which is ironic, considering that firearms were used in Europe for a long time before full plate was invented. I believe there are actually indications that full plate was developed because firearms were around. That also goes for henotheism (google it), the presence of elves, the explicit answers that gods can give (including whether kings rule by divine mandate or not), wizards, and so forth. Your typical "medieval European" fantasy looks absolutely nothing like medieval Europe. I guess that's just what people want though.
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Feb 18, 2016 21:44
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Re: Athas, Planescape, and Spelljammer. A weird trend I noticed even as a green gamer back in the 90s without internet is that you had these game lines with their own cosmologies and they all tried to establish their own supremacy over the others. Like, Planescape very clearly had the idea that all other campaign settings were a part of its Great Wheel cosmology somewhere. Dark Sun had its own, different cosmology and so it wasn't... except that Planescape said "nuh uh you belong to me!" just the same, probably in some Dragon article somewhere. Spelljammer and Planescape coexisting is a bit of a nightmare. They both claim to model the multiverse and their models are somewhat contradictory, but they shoehorned it in anyway. Ravenloft poached a bit of Dark Sun even though that shouldn't be possible. It all feels a bit like petty office politics, different cliques trying to one-up each other over the lowest, most imaginary stakes of all time. E: I think supplements such as the Complete Book of Elves also weighed in on this, explaining the various sub-races across all game lines with an evolutionary chart or something? Saying that they all came from the same original stock, something like that. Sage Genesis fucked around with this message at 00:50 on Feb 20, 2016 |
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Feb 20, 2016 00:42
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Payndz posted:At what point did specific settings become such a big deal in D&D, anyway? As far as I can tell, the early to mid 90s. This is the era when 2e released Dark Sun, Planescape, and Birthright. Also Ravenloft as a whole setting of its own instead of just an adventure. It was the era of metaplot, and White Wolf had shown that people just loved the notion of factions. Just read the various cliques in WW material (vampire clans and such) and then compare them to the Planescape philosophy clubs. You could easily port an adventure from Greyhawk to the Realms or maybe Dragonlance. But Dark Sun or Planescape... not so much.
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Feb 20, 2016 22:46
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Payndz posted:Oh god, the rats. I did a test with the Caves of Chaos for 5e, and the rats resulted in a TPK before the characters got past the pit trap. One thing I've noticed over the years is that 3e was made with the assistance of witchcraft. Because for some reason it managed to convince people that things had always been this way. I can't even begin to count the number of times someone said "4e changed this thing which all previous editions had", where all "all editions" of course actually means "only 3e". It's not just people who can't know any better either. I play a bit of 5e every now and then (mostly an excuse to hang with my friends, not my system of choice) and they keep making mistakes like that. If the monster does X thing here then that will do Y and.... no, that was 3e. 5e doesn't work that way. It goes the other way as well. A year or two ago we took a trip down nostalgia lane and played some 2e... and they still kept making those mistakes. Skill checks work like this, yes? Rogues can backstab if they flank, yes? This is done with an opposed strength check, yes? What do you mean monsters don't have strength scores? I don't know how they did it, but 3e managed to convince almost everybody that it was the normal way of doing things which had always been like that. It's insane. So yeah, then you have to playtest 5e and you get shouted down with bullshit about how many small enemies can fit into a square. Except that that wasn't even a rule back then. But good luck explaining that to people; it's D&D, so of course it's a rule even when it's not a rule. thespaceinvader posted:Fundamentally the playtest was not actually a playtest. It was a 'play this stuff we designed and fill out our forms which we've written so that you have no choice but to tell us what we want to know and we can make the next iteration exactly how we want it'. One of my favorite bits of that process was the "Does this feel like a [monster] to you?" questions. They'd give a description for gnolls or gnomes or whatever and then you'd have to answer how much it felt like it matched up with what you had in your head. Except that has a couple of big and overlooked unspoken assumptions. Does this feel like a gnome is not the same as what do I want out of the gnome. And multiple correct answers are possible. A garden gnome, an earth elemental, and Warcraft style engineering dudes all feel like gnomes to me. But that doesn't mean they are all the right choice for D&D - in fact, I'd say none of them are. So yeah, good luck making a proper playtest with that kind of attitude.
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Feb 22, 2016 12:06
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Dr. Quarex posted:This reminds me of when my fellow Goon Captain Rat came back from Gen-Con excitedly with Iron Heroes about a decade ago, and passed it around our usual gaming table for everyone to peruse. The guy who typically GMs for us got, like, visually angry about the entire concept of a game that functionally eschews magic in a D&D-mechanical setting, and refused to ever play it. This is the same guy who hates 4th Edition for the usual reasons, and yet at least in the case of 4th Edition he played it a few times before deciding he hated it...whereas he would literally not even deign to spend a moment playing Iron Heroes because it so opposed his vision of what D&D is supposed to be. People have some very strong feelings about this for reasons I cannot begin to fathom. Iron Heroes is by no means perfect, it could benefit from a second edition and injecting some 4e- and 5e-concepts to replace the clunky 3e clutter. What I mean by that is, it's a flawed game and one can certainly refuse to play it over legitimate issues. But "it eschews magic so it must suck"? Wow. Just... wow.
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Feb 24, 2016 16:54
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Wait, wait, wait. Correct me if I misremember something, but... So in 2000-ish, WotC made their OGL thing. They hoped that this would cause people to flock to their game. But over time it actually paved the way for Pathfinder, set up by a company which was once their ally. Now in 2015-ish, WotC made their online publishing store thing. They hope that this would cause people to flock to their game. But now it actually paved the way for a competitor set up by companies which were supposed to have become their allies? Yes? I mean... that can't be true, can it? I must be wrong about something here.
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Mar 11, 2016 22:56
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Kai Tave posted:(Snip Wuxia Weapons "cronk") Wut? So... if I take this, uh, "cronk" then I have to keep a detailed log of exactly when I wielded each weapon in the past? I mean I could wield a certain sword and then leave it home for safekeeping, but now I'm on a 125-day timer and will need to keep track of when I can no longer recall it? Are you loving serious? Are we back to Gygax's "YOU CANNOT HAVE A MEANINGFUL CAMPAIGN IF STRICT TIME RECORDS ARE NOT KEPT" territory? Also, speaking as a bit of a purist who worked on several wuxia RPGs: the word "wuxia" doesn't refer to types of weapons. It's a type of genre. You might as well call a perfectly ordinary revolver a "spaghetti western weapon" or a typical arming sword a "Tokien fantasy weapon". See how dumb that sounds?
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Apr 15, 2016 13:12
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ProfessorCirno posted:The man has managed to drift from one outstanding failure to the next, destroying everything he touches, and yet still got hired again and again. And by people who overwhelmingly should've known better, at that! Speaking of which: Pathfinder Online. How's Goblinworks doing these days? *checks around* Their last update was two months ago (feb 29), when they said: "The process to transfer Pathfinder Online to a new developer is progressing nicely, but our own deadline of March 1st for the transfer to happen has been pushed for a month or two." So... you didn't meet your deadline then, and it looks like you didn't meet the deadline today either. So how's this working out for you guys?
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Apr 30, 2016 12:15
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Nuns with Guns posted:There are lots of problems with implementing dungeons. Unity is not one of them. So on the one hand... "Doing interior spaces is too demanding for our team." But on the other hand... "This game is all about building forts, and protecting villages, and buying taverns for LegitCash™ and all sorts of other interior spaces." How? 
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May 2, 2016 08:37
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Kurieg posted:I don't like the fact that they do a "Failures subtract from successes" thing. Do they? The second post of the linked thread says that this is not the case. Perhaps it was like that at some point in an early playtest and it got changed later? Remains to be seen if Star Trek has such a failure-cancels-success thing.
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Jul 21, 2016 21:24
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Jesus Christ. 
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Aug 4, 2016 01:37
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gradenko_2000 posted:Cup-and-Ball Proficiency: Your armor check penalty no longer applies to cup-and-ball checks All of which are prerequisites for the Ball-Cupper prestige class. Nobody quite cups the balls like they can.
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Aug 15, 2016 12:15
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Leperflesh posted:I'm the GM who made the encounter with the rock exactly 151 feet away that the druid/sorcerer/wizard caaaaan't quite reach due to the range of the spell being only 150 feet. [puts on his robe and munchkin hat] When a spell is "Wiz 5" it actually means it's a 5th level spell, which requires a 9th level caster. (Because Jesus Christ, Dungeons & Dragons, what the gently caress are you even doing?) In other words, the tower is comfortably within the 190' range. On the other hand, a range of "medium (100 + 10/level) is a 3e style of notation and verboten in 5e. On the other other hand, assuming for a moment the spell's range was really 150 feet, only the spell's point of origin must be within range. With an area of "cube", the point of origin is a point stuck to the outer edge of the cube (see PHB p. 204). So the spell can reach 150 feet and there create a bunch of cubes, which project outward, jutting out of the spell's maximum range by 9 feet, which should be plenty to destroy the supporting walls of a tower. [/puts on his robe and munchkin hat] (For the love of god, somebody send help.)
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Apr 14, 2017 13:00
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Leperflesh posted:I'm not attacking you, Sage Genesis, I'm just using this as a case study. I know a lot of the complaints about 4e when it came out were supposedly because it nerfed spellcasters or turned spellcasting into something more like World of Warcraft. But I look at this loving mess and think holy poo poo, why would a player playing a spellcaster, or especially a GM dealing with one, put up with this crap? I certainly did, but only when I didn't know there was a better way. Oh, I don't feel attacked at all. We're both just poking fun at the way D&D handles spells. senrath posted:Actually, the maximum range is the maximum range. Any area of a spell that would extend past the listed max range just doesn't happen. For some strange reason I was thinking of the 5e spell rules.
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Apr 14, 2017 23:17
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Ferrinus posted:There's a Wall of Ice in 4E, although it's higher level. IIRC You can actually fly as early as level 6 in 4E, but 1/day, only for five minutes, and you have to keep spending minor actions to stay aloft. There is also the Pouch of Frozen Passage, a magic item which has literally just one single function: make bridges of ice over bodies of water. When it comes to "freeze water into a bridge", both 3e and 4e have explicit options to do it. They also both have cold-related powers which don't explicitly do this (ie. Cone of Cold, in either edition). The only real difference, IMO, is that 3e launched with a lot of "toy" spells and then gradually tightened up its balance as best as it could. Whereas 4e launched with tight balance, and then gradually introduced more and more "toys". If you look at both lines in their matured state, they're really not miles apart anymore. (Assuming you do the smart thing and ban all of 3e's PHB classes.)
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Apr 16, 2017 00:40
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Kurieg posted:To the point that it looks like W:TA is backsliding to it's 1st edition roots. Hm. That doesn't sound appealing. Source(s)?
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May 12, 2017 20:22
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Siivola posted:Okay but what do you actually do with all that? Good question. Those Atomic Bees sound lame. It's basically just The Jetsons Effect - you take a normal thing and slap prefixes on it ("space" in the case of The Jetsons). So first you have some kind of bees, which live in hives and make honey. They pollinate flowers and if they sting you, you die. Now they're some kind of atomic bees, which live in nuclear hives and make atomic honey or whatever. There's also super-flowers and super-death if you get stung. This is basically the very lowest kind of "creativity" you can get. Here, watch. I'll do it right now. I'll make uh... lunar bees. Sure. So the moon itself is a giant hive, alright? And every full moon the lunar bees descend from heaven at night to drink deeply from the uh... I dunno, the night orchids which only bloom under the full moon? Sure. And their sting mutates you into a raging werewolf until the next dawn, so people think that it's some curse that repeats once a month and then they hang a guy and the problem doesn't repeat itself. Which is tragic because it was just an insect sting and nobody would've transformed next month (unless they got stung again of course) so the "solution" was just post-hoc correlation, lending my setting irony and pathos. There. Am I creative enough yet? Do I get money now? Wait. gently caress, I forgot about the honey. Uh... it's like this stuff which looks like molten silver and it's really great in some unspecified way. Cool, saved it. Not convinced yet? Ok, volcano-bees. They're these little obsidian bastards who fly out of the volcano once a century to drink up entire forests (they inhale the smoke, so it does involve burning the surrounding earth for miles around). Lava is actually volcano-honey. Your adventure is to rush into an evacuated town and steal all of its treasure while the volcano-bees get ever closes, a glittering swarm of roiling sparks. But be careful, besides the bees there's plenty of Bigger Animals and Quirky NPCs on your journey to contend with! On drivethru now for $5.99! There's really nothing to this. Hoplite-bees, dragon-bees, nano-bees, junkyard-bees, chrono-bees, a child could do this stuff.
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Jul 10, 2017 13:55
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Mr. Maltose posted:Both of those sound really cool though actually? I'm putting volcano bees in my next game for sure. Oh, sure, the bees are perfectly usable game elements. I just often see this high praise for "normal thing with a theme slapped on it" and I just... don't really get it? It doesn't sound hard to come up with this stuff, IMO. Edit: Ok, reading back I see I'm not expressing myself clearly and coming across as a bit of a dick. So let me try that again. Neat concepts are cool, absolutely. I'm not trying to poo poo on atomic bees or volcano bees or whatever. My thing is, I think that concepts and stories are way easier to do than mechanics. (Or at least easier to do well.) So the idea of atomic bees is fine but I also heard they have a save-or-die and are worth the same xp as a ferret which is just bigger than normal? My reaction to that is: "Great so you gave me a concept but not the right mechanics. That's not all that useful, I could've done that concept myself." Sage Genesis fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Jul 10, 2017 |
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Jul 10, 2017 14:02
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Ettin posted:Give me the atomic bees and the space bees and whatever other cool bees you got. Bee me. Clockwork bees emerge from their copper chrysalis with exactly 180 rotations left on their minute mainspring hearts. Every day the bees work on their hives of iron and bronze, go out to gather crude oil, and assemble new larvae from the tiny gearworks their queen produces. And every day their mainsprings make one rotation. The advanced human empires employ veritable armies of beekeepers, harvesting their essential petrochem-honey. You think the steampunk world is a bleak and smoky one? Naw, think again son. Go outside of the city and you'll see fields of oilslick-iridescent flowers as far as the eye can see, where the air is abuzz with the sound of springs and gears, ticking down.
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Jul 10, 2017 14:43
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Darwinism posted:Hey screw you the BoVD movie was amazingly hilarious because it was so bad. Just imagine that the swarm dude is the protag and it's a much better movie. I unironically love the scene where the little undead girl suckles on the taste of people's evil, as a sort of "purity test" for evil parties. Especially when the protagonist, who had been doing bad poo poo to fake being evil so he could infiltrate the band, turned out to have fully slipped down the dark side by then. I thought that was pretty neat.
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Aug 24, 2017 23:31
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Leperflesh posted:rape half-orcs are a direct result of doubling down on the "always chaotic evil" alignment descriptor used frequently in old-school D&D. [useless nitpick] Pre-3e, orcs were lawful evil. [/useless nitpick] For some odd reason you rarely hear grogs about that. I don't know how they did it, but for tons of people I know, both in the meatscape and online, "nostalgia" is synonymous with 3e/PF.
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Nov 23, 2017 19:40
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moths posted:Objectionable posters can also be silenced with the Ignore feature here, which goes a long way towards mitigating high noise / low content blowhards. That can make the forum very unappealing to new posters though. If I start to throw n-bombs around on RPGnet from now on, and some prospective new member reads that, can we really expect them to sign up for an account and put me on ignore? Or is it more likely they'll just nope the gently caress out and stay away forever? (I'm assuming the prospective poster is a person of good taste. Seeing that kind of poo poo go unmoderated can also quickly attract an entirely different sort of crowd.) That's a bit of an extreme example of course, but not by much. I recall the old Exalted Compendium site's forum in... 2002? Ish? Anyway, there was this one obnoxious poster who just had to hurl the most obscene kind of gutter language around all the loving time and it seriously drove people off because there was no moderation to be found. Not saying RPGnet moderation is flawless or anything, but some of these proposed fixes... aren't. edit: ninja'd Sage Genesis fucked around with this message at 21:55 on Feb 2, 2018 |
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Feb 2, 2018 21:53
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Mors Rattus posted:While I appreciate what you're saying, there is a vast excluded middle between 'you may not say anything mean ever' and 'drop n-bombs all the time at will.' I did say it was an extreme example, and followed it up with a significantly less extreme one - and one which actually happened at that. I think we can all agree here that the n-bomb scenario is unacceptable. Good. But then what is acceptable? That we create an environment with lots of hostility and expect those who are turned off by that to use ignore lists?
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Feb 2, 2018 22:12
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Mors Rattus posted:Gareth Michael Skarka ... Yeah fair enough.
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Feb 2, 2018 22:22
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Dawgstar posted:Eh, I wouldn't want to see you banned at the Big Purple, Kai. At the least I want to see how Morgrave turns out. I'll never stop being weirded out by the idea that there are actually people following this game. Makes me even more embarrassed by my lovely posting lately.
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Feb 11, 2018 22:35
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